Freshdesk picks up $31 million in funding

Customer support software firm Freshdesk has picked up $31 million in its latest round of funding from a clutch of investors that includes Tiger Global and Accel Partners, two venture capital funds that have been active in India’s start-up ecosystem.

The Chennai-based company, which creates customer support software in the software-as-a-service market, will also become one of the first companies in India to be funded by Google Capital.

Customer-support issues come in through a variety of channels, including phone, web, email and chat, as well social channels, among others.

Freshdesk helps manage and prioritize the problems and distribute them to reps.

This new round of investment puts the company’s total funding at close to $44 million.

Despite competition from Zendesk, Desk.com, and others, Freshdesk has built up a sizable customer base over the last three years.

Freshdesk now has 23,000 customers across the globe, up from 14,000 in December, according to the company.

“We actually still have some money left over from our last round of funding, which was around $7 million. So we aren’t burning cash in that sense. But we want to build up our product portfolio and invest in sales and marketing,” Girish Mathrubootham, Founder and CEO, told this correspondent on Thursday.

“We are also thrilled to have Google Capital join us as an investor… we have been talking with them for sometime,” he added.

The company's main development operations are based out of Chennai, with the firm having a sales and marketing presence in San Francisco.